With rapid advance in semiconductor technology as well as in electronic display industry, the designs for all kinds of consumer electronic products, including cellular phones, notebook computers and other digital household appliances, are becoming more and more diversified while their lifespan are shorten as well. In addition, they are designed to be compact, portable, easy and comfort to use, and fashionable that all those innovated new designs is most welcomed by consumers and thus becoming the main stream in the market. However, it's a dilemma for any electronic devices to bring the right balance between the portability requirement for thinner, lighter and smaller products and the comfort in usage. For usage comfort, it is important for the electronic device to have a large display screen by which eyes of a user of the electronic device are likely to suffer less stress when he/she is reading messages from the display screen of the electronic device. Nevertheless, it usually may have difficulties to design an electronic device that is compact and with good portability, but the same time is configured with a large-sized display screen as it is limited by the flexibility of the display screen.
For overcoming the aforesaid dilemma, there are more and more manufacturers focusing their researches on the development of flexible units. Imaging that when all the parts used in an electronic device, such as a cellular phone or a notebook computer, are flexible units, such electronic device should be easy to carry around since it can be rolled up or folded even when it is configured with a large-sized display screen. Despite of the obvious advantage in flexible units, there are still many technical difficulties to be overcome before such flexible units to be realized and thus there is no mass-produced flexible unit available at the moment. Currently, in most sci-tech papers, the flexible unit is just a part that can be bended or flexed where at most there is a ruler provided for measuring an allowable bending radius of such flexible units. It is noted that there is no definition regarding to the flexibility of any flexible unit, nor is there any in-depth study or standard specification relating to the optical, mechanical and electrical characteristics of bended flexible units. Therefore, it is required to have a robust mechanism for not only defining the flexibility for flexible units in a quantification manner, but also for inspecting and evaluating the optical, mechanical and electrical characteristics of bended flexible units.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,721,979, a method for inspecting flexible device is provided by which a flexible device is conveyed to pass through a plurality of rollers of different radiuses where it is bended into different bending states of different bending radiuses, and a performance inspection is performed on the flexible device for inspecting its electrical, optical, or opto-electric characteristics as it is being bended in different bending states. Although, by the aforesaid method, the apparatus for inspecting flexible devices can be integrated into the apparatus for manufacturing flexible devices, the performance inspection is not thorough enough since the radiuses of the rollers used in the inspection are fixed that it can only bend the flexible device into the curvatures conforming to those rollers and nothing more.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,980,291, a method and apparatus for inspecting a curved shape are provided. The inspection apparatus is substantially an image capturing device integrated with a dot matrix light source comprising a plurality of dot light sources. Operationally, at first, an flexible device which is not bended is illuminated by the dot matrix light source so as to be imaged by the image capturing device while registering the resulting image into a memory device; and then, without changing the positioning of the image capturing device and the dot matrix light source, the imaging capturing device is enabled to pick up another imager of the flexible device when it is bended. As there are differences between the image of the flexible device that is not bended and the image of the bended flexible device and the two images are stored in the memory device which is accessible to a computer, the bending radius of the bended flexible device can be obtained by the calculation of the computer using the two images. However, although the aforesaid method can be used for obtaining the bending radius of a bended flexible device, it usually provides no effective means for bending the flexible device into different bending states so as to be applied in actual practice for inspecting characteristics of the flexible device. Thus, it is usually difficult to built a lookup table relating the optical, mechanical and electrical characteristics of a bended flexible unit to its bending states.
Therefore, the invention provides a method and system for inspecting characteristics of bended flexible units that are free from the aforesaid shortcomings.